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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 9274739" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, what I'm saying is, and maybe 'cherry picking' is a less productive way of putting it, is that you're surely remembering the two (or whatever it is) times you had this experience, vs the 100's or 1000's of times you didn't, which don't stand out in the same way. I mean, I have a similar thing going with sloggy encounters. I can remember a number (4 or 5) sloggy 4e battles that dragged out, but that's out of 10 years of play! So it is a possibility, but not something I would focus on in my descriptions of 4e combat. Partly the reason being once we had a couple of those we were like "Oh, don't put 5 orcs in a room with one door" and figured out the optimum ways to play this specific game.I think there's a fairly strong consensus amongst people who enjoy playing 4e a lot that the WotC design team was a mixed lot, some of whom did not really have a good feel for the game, or wanted it to be some completely other game. There's very solid and actionable advice, backed by appropriate design, for a highly dynamic Narrativist kind of super dynamic 'shonen style' type of game, but certain people within WotC seem to have hated this idea and done their best to subvert it. What they were offering instead, sadly, is not very exciting to be perfectly frank. So you have crap SC examples like "Convince the Duke" (I give it 1 star). At the same time you have some really excellent examples, and by focusing on "what does this do well, and how do I do it?" instead of spending all my energy on "it's all garbage and badwrongfun" which seems to have been a common reaction, we got the good game that is there instead of the fairly blah one that half of WotC tried to shift on people.Well, I agree that 4e is not well-suited to old school dungeon crawl kind of play (it actually can do it in small doses, I think I actually ran 4 or 5 small dungeons at various times), nor is it super good for kind of traditional set-piece situational play. In terms of things like 'big bads', I mean, for most of the levels of play in 4e if you drop a solo monster at level+5, in its home field, on the party (or maybe level+4 plus a few extras) things get dicey REAL fast! I recall a stupid nasty scenario where a party decided they could kill off a Black Dragon that was lairing in a wooded swamp. They get near the things lair and it is deep opaque pools of bog water filled with piles of rotting fallen trees, with limited line of site due to the living moss-covered trees. Man that dragon had a field day with the party, popping up here and there for a split second, dropping darkness on them, barfing a load of acid, and then back out of sight, etc. etc. etc. Yes if you run that lame ass E3 module with Orcus as the big bad, that was just sad. Just say no. I mean, just put it this way, Orcus flies well, what if he was 200 squares above you dropping naughty word on you? (yeah, dragons can do that too, so can any intelligent flyer, you aren't beating intelligent fliers in my games if you are a ground pounder, not unless you can force them to come fight you). I mean, if you make such lame encounters in 1e Demon Lords are cheese too. I have no idea what the authors of these 'adventures' were thinking, but they were not thinking epic!</blockquote>

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